I remember learning Spanish and Chinese in American classes. The teacher would explain one of the language’s concepts in English, then define each vocabulary word in English. Finally, we would practice in the new language. I grew accustomed to that method. It became the easy way to learn.<\/p>\n
Now, I’m in a German class full of people who don’t speak English at all. Well, that’s not entirely true. One guy kind of speaks English. And the people teaching the class know how to speak English. They can’t, though. It would go right over most of the class’s head. While we’re on the subject, these are my classmates:<\/p>\n
I’m changing each classmate’s name for this blog. Most of me thinks it would be no big deal to use their real names, but the paranoid part (read: considerate part?) of me thinks I should ask them if it’s okay before doing so. And I’m not ready for that conversation, yet. Hey, nice to meet you. I’m gonna blog about you. Can I use your real name?<\/p>\n
Anyway, these teachers’ (there are two who alternate) approaches are different than the ones my American teachers used. The entire class is in German, so they speak in patterns until we’re able to infer the meaning of a word or phrase. For example:<\/p>\n
“Ryan kommt aus den USA. Paulius kommt aus Litauen. Ich komme aus Deutschland. Woher kommst du, Isabella?”<\/p>\n
At this point, we all infer that he’s talking about where we’re from, and Isabella just heard how to say it in the first person, so she can answer “Ich komme aus Spanien.” We all have an inkling that “ich” is “I,” “kommt” “kommst” and “komme” are all conjugations of some verb that means “to come” and when you want to say you’re from a place, you say “aus [the place].” It’s only been three days, but I’m thinking this is a really effective way to learn. My head hurts after three hours in a way that says that has to be the case. Anyway, it makes us think a bit harder about the language, and it forces us to bypass the awkward translation stage of learning a language (think in English, translate to German, speak in German).<\/p>\n
So there’s a really good reason to study a language in its home country. Another one is that it’s crazy learning a language with people who speak different languages natively. You get to see, for example, which phonetics give Spaniards a tough time, and which structures give Japanese people a tough time (it would seem that all of them do in a Western language like German). Look forward to more about that in a future post.<\/p>\n
Also, in the near future, I’ll write about my classmates’ reasons for being in Munich, InterNations–a networking group for expats (we’re going to some kind of night club party on Thursday with them)–trying to eat with a growing German vocabulary, and maybe the time I got sick after eating German quesadillas (yeah, I should have known better).<\/p>\n
Tsch\u00fcss!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I remember learning Spanish and Chinese in American classes. The teacher would explain one of the language’s concepts in English, then define each vocabulary word in English. Finally, we would practice in the new language. I grew accustomed to that method. It became the easy way to learn. Now, I’m in a German class full … Continue reading “Post #2: German for Non-Germans”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[19,35,44],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-university","tag-class","tag-german","tag-ideas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1839,"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/1839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ryankeelerlives.com\/bittesuite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}